Crossing the linguistic threshold: Language, hospitality and linguistic exchange in Philippe Lioret's Welcome and Rachid Bouchareb's London River

Abstract

ABSTRACTInterest in the dynamics of border-crossing and migration has been a remarkable development among both film-makers and film scholars in recent years, and the cinemas of France and of the francophone world have been no exception to this. There is still much room for work, however, concerning the linguistic aspect of this dynamic. This article will discuss the use of multilingualism in two French films of 2009, Philippe Lioret's Welcome and Rachid Bouchareb's London River. In both these films a meeting between local and migrant characters is negotiated by use of a third language, native to neither and also displaced. Adopting the metaphor of hospitality developed by Mireille Rosello, which Lioret's film in particular makes explicit in its structure, and reflecting also on Jean-Luc Godard's famous description of language as ‘la maison où l'homme habite’, the article traces the concept of a ‘threshold language’, a space ‘on the doorstep’ in which a tentative cultural meeting can be initiated on equal terms and without commitment to the dangerous crossing into that place where the other is at home. It thus examines the negotiation of linguistic territories and suggests that these two films offer a challenge to conventional assumptions about linguistic assimilation and, through language, an alternative to the fraught assumptions of migrant relationships as those between host and guest.